Some people like to make a big deal over languages dying, particularly if the language is one that they never really liked. I say, why make a fuss? Sure, some languages will decrease in popularity, but they're still there to use if you want, and there will always be a die-hard community of fans that keep it alive. Why hold a big whoop-de-doo circus to celebrate the ebb and flow of language popularity?

s/Chimpanzees/Humans/;

Yes, the historical (archaeological?) data does show that CO2 levels rise after warming, but that in no way disproves that CO2 also causes warming. If the permafrost melts, and if the methane hydrates on the sea bed are released by ocean warming, then that will release an enormous amount of trapped CO2, so yes, warming caused by greenhouse gas is predicted to also cause CO2 release. No contradiction there.

As long as you claim that, and you're right. It's a tough call, I admit. And, the only reason that I don't support such measures is the George Carlin theory - the planet will be fine. Better off without us, probably, so if we trash ourselves through stupidity, then so be it.

Could be free as soon as 2010 or 2015, as against the 2050 that the IPCC had forecast. Sure, it's not as bad as the very very worst possibility that one expert has warned. We're not out of the woods yet.

This is how science happens. You study, you theorise, you predict, you measure, you GOTO 10. If you don't publish your predicitons, then nobody learns and science cannot progress, especially in a long term field like climatology. We may well not know what the truth is behind CO2 and AGW until well past my lifetime. But if scientists don't publish their results, then we cannot learn anything. And some of those results will be extreme worst case predicitons, and most of those by definition will be proven to be false. And that's a good thing, as long as we don't rush blindly in the opposite direction whenever one worst case scenario fails to happen.

If and when it ends, it will end for reasons. There will be some set of physical processes that drive the cycle or rhythm or rollercoaster or whatever you want to call it. We're trying to figure out what those processes are, and we've discovered that CO2 in the atmosphere seems to be having a bad effect as far as our comfort is concerned. So, I guess, scientists will be those who say when it ends, if we let them figure it out, and right now most scientists are saying that too much CO2 is a bad thing. Sure, there was tons of CO2 and maybe no ice caps in the cretaceous period, and maybe if we increase the CO2 we can grow to be the size of dinosaurs, or maybe elephants will take over the world, but I'm not keen on either of those outcomes. I don't want to be cretaceous, they didn't have iPhones.

Yeah, but there's not much we can do about that. "People breathe, therefore it's ok to dump another half trillion tons of carbon out of the ground into the atmosphere" isn't really a convinving argument.

Yes. Sure. Maybe some of that trillion tons (the half trillion we already liberated, and the other half trillion that's following on rapildy) will be absorbed by plant life. After all, it was plant life that it came from. Maybe if we take the carbon that had been captured by plants and stored over hundreds of millions of years as fossil fuels, and release it into the atmosphere in a few decades, maybe plant life will be able to keep up with that. Or maybe not.

I deliberately chose extreme examples, and I deliberately chose one example that I have sympathy with (that AGW presents a threat to the western way of life) and one that I do not (that there is a god).

Yeah, it's not a constructive attitude to take. But, if I'm convinced that global warming is going to wipe out the human race, then anyone who is arguing on the other side is directly contributing to the extermination of humanity, and that's not going to endear me to them. And in a broader sense regarding "liberals", tolerant people can't be expected to be tolerant of intolerance. Same with religion - if I'm convinced that anyone not worshipping God is helping the devil to destroy the world, then I'm not really going to be sympathetic to atheists or other religions. Of course to someone who disagrees with me on any of these positions, I'm just some nutjob. But if I'm right, well, what otherwise outrageous actions are acceptable in order to save the world?

Or, just support the people who are doing it the way you want it done. Not everyone has the time to get personally involved in the free software movement, but most of us can throw a few zlotti in the direction of the people that they like.

When I was 15, we had to choose a book to study and read a report on it in front of the class. I chose Animal Farm. The teacher criticized me for "still reading children's books at your age", and the whole class laughed at me. I failed English at that school, but got an 'A' when I re-sat at a different school a year later.

Banned by several libraries due to crudity.

No, it's not banned, and neither are 1984, Fahrenheit 451, or any of the others in the poll. They were banned at some point - presumably - although I'm not sure if TKAMB was.

That's a big "if". A lot of Linux developers really never have cared about desktops. "The year of Linux on the desktop" has always been a media thing.

My dad and I wrote a BASIC interpreter for the IBM PC in the '80s called BBasic, based on the Acorn BBC Micro dialect. BBC BASIC had an "EVAL" function, where it took a string and interpreted it as an expression. I persuaded dad that we should expand this functionality to an EXEC statement, that would take a string and interpret it as BASIC commands. If you put a line number at the start of the string, it would insert the code in the string into the program that was running - so you could have self-modifying BASIC code. There was one restriction, that if any of the points in the call stack were prior to the inserted statement, then it would fall over in a very untidy heap.

It actually turned out to be pretty useful, the one used that I can remember was to store persistent data within the program itself, and you could save a program as an executable that included a runtime interpreter.